Singapore

In mid May I was in Singapore, visiting SIIA, the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.  SIIA is an independent think tank which is conducting a joint project with Hong Kong’s Civic Exchange concerning Asia’s upcoming position in the Kyoto Protocol COP/MOP meetings being held in Poznan, Poland later this year.  The two organizations brought together an international group of specialists to help them in this endeavor, and we held a spirited series of discussions on emissions trading and similar climate-related topics at SIIA.  With such a group in town, it seemed appropriate to hold a public session as well, and the Singapore Management University agreed to provide a venue for that event.  Many thanks to Simon Tay (of SIIA) and Christine Loh (of Civic Exchange) for organizing such an interesting meeting, and for the invitation to attend.

While in town, I also took an opportunity to visit…..   a prison camp.  Actually, it was the museum at the site of the former Changi prison camp of World War II — the setting for James Clavell’s well known novel King Rat.  I’ve always been a big Clavell fan (e.g., Noble House, Tai Pan, etc.), but found King Rat to be a bit different than the others — I guess because it was based on his real-world experience as a POW there.  I watched the (surprisingly good) 1965 movie of the same name when I got home, but they’ve built a completely new & modern prison complex at the site — and truthfully it seemed rather hard to relate anything in the movie or museum exhibits to what’s at Changi now.  There’s a pleasant ‘al fresco’ dining area immediately adjacent to the main display section of the museum, and so I sat at the open-air bar, drinking an ice-cold Tiger beer — looking out through the shady trees at the upscale housing across the street.  You couldn’t quite make out the Japanese school located a couple of hundred meters further up the road.   It’s a very different (and obviously very much better) world in Changi now — & so I sat there drinking my beer, thinking that perhaps the rapidity of such radical change really does offer a basis for cautious optimism.